Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Progress on the Healing Quilt

I've been working away on the healing quilt and it's really nice to see progress so rapidly.  It helps that it's a small project (the show requirement is 20 x 30).  Last week I showed the first two painted images, and after painting the third one I started auditioning fabric for the surrounding edges.

It was a bit challenging to find something that would go with the golds in the paint- there are really a lot of variations in "gold" and many of my gold fabrics that I'd originally thought to use were much too yellow.


I settled on the gradient brown which is on the top left in the left hand picture and the right in the middle picture.  After setting in my painted images, I quilted each panel separately and it was sure nice to have small things to quilt!

To better replicate the blood leakage that characterizes the retina in diabetic retinopathy, I added a bunch of beading to that panel.



In the macular dystrophy eye, the normal vasculature is much attenuated, and new vessels form in incorrect planes (in front of or behind the normal vasculature).  They also adopt an abnormal morphology, so I stitched down a couple different types of wired gold ribbon to give a dimensional effect.



The panels aren't wide enough to be by themselves, so I'm working on some cutwork side pieces to widen it out.  For now, I'll leave you with a dog picture.  I just happened to catch Bentley mid-lick so it looks like he's sticking his tongue out at me.  He loves sitting there in the sun against the door to my studio.  You'd think he'd get too hot this time of year, but that's one of his favorite spots.


Also, just in the spirit of animals, we have bunches of large toads this year (this one is probably 3-4" long).  I always welcome them since they eat bugs, and they're really very calm.  They love sitting on the back porch at night staring in the sliding glass doors.  I think it must be because the lights inside the house draw the bugs, but they sit and stare so intently that it looks like they're just dying to come inside and some mean person is excluding them.


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